004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
“Did I say something wrong?” A word-level analysis of Wikipedia articles for deletion discussions
(2016)
This thesis focuses on gaining linguistic insights into textual discussions on a word level. It was of special interest to distinguish messages that constructively contribute to a discussion from those that are detrimental to them. Thereby, we wanted to determine whether “I”- and “You”-messages are indicators for either of the two discussion styles. These messages are nowadays often used in guidelines for successful communication. Although their effects have been successfully evaluated multiple times, a large-scale analysis has never been conducted. Thus, we used Wikipedia Articles for Deletion (short: AfD) discussions together with the records of blocked users and developed a fully automated creation of an annotated data set. In this data set, messages were labelled either constructive or disruptive. We applied binary classifiers to the data to determine characteristic words for both discussion styles. Thereby, we also investigated whether function words like pronouns and conjunctions play an important role in distinguishing the two. We found that “You”-messages were a strong indicator for disruptive messages which matches their attributed effects on communication. However, we found “I”-messages to be indicative for disruptive messages as well which is contrary to their attributed effects. The importance of function words could neither be confirmed nor refuted. Other characteristic words for either communication style were not found. Yet, the results suggest that a different model might represent disruptive and constructive messages in textual discussions better.
Web-programming is a huge field of different technologies and concepts. Each technology implements a web-application requirement like content generation or client-server communication. Different technologies within one application are organized by concepts, for example architectural patterns. The thesis describes an approach for creating a taxonomy about these web-programming components using the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Our 101companies project uses implementations to identify and classify the different technology sets and concepts behind a web-application framework. These classifications can be used to create taxonomies and ontologies within the project. The thesis also describes, how we priorize useful web-application frameworks with the help of Wikipedia. Finally, the created implementations concerning web-programming are documented.
Abstract For a significant length of time, computer simulation programs have been the preferred tools of sociologists to analyse " thus confirm or refute " sociological theories, scenarios, presumptions and assumptions. Many different simulation platforms for various domains exist. The EmIL project aims to create a new simulation platform specifically to analyse norm emergence. This platform is divided into sections, thereby allowing the analysis of individual norm emergence: this is not currently possible, thus EmIL-S may represent a significant improvement over current simulation platforms. This diploma thesis describes the concepts behind the project and provides a prototype for the simulation program EmIL-S. The creation of the prototype and the underlying development process are described in detail. The experience gained during this process is analysed and described. In the course of this analysis, the malfunctions and errors within EmIL-S are explained; the solutions to these malfunctions and errors are noted, along with other proposed improvements. This diploma thesis can also be used as a helpful manual to build simulations within the simulation platform.